Maxim Khomyakov
Introduction
T
he ideas of Global South and Global North today seem to have substituted the previous geopolitical notion of an East–West divide as well as the concepts of the First, Second and Third Worlds. It is probably too obvious that this new divide is as biased and as loaded with ideological constructs and unavoidable contradictions as both previous ones. If we pay closer attention to the details, we find the difficulties, which blur the picture. How, for example, did Australia turn out to be in the Global North or Russia, the former leader of the‘Eastern’ or ‘Second’ World, drift towards the Global South together with its polar regions and Arctic ambitions? It is not really clear how one can unite culturally, geographically, economically and politi-cally different countries into a single unit as wide as a Global North or Global South. If North is neatly defined as European and North American societies (with the possible inclusion of Australia and New Zealand), one can only wonder whether we do not face here the good old Eurocentric world-outlook in just slightly changed clothes. This really becomes obvious when a relatively homogenous ‘North’ is opposed to a ‘South’ containing countries as different as India, Brazil, China, Russia and South Africa. Political will and overlapping interests can probably bring these countries closer within the frameworks of the BRICS countries club; but they cannot change the background of very different histories, the background from the depths of which they ask and answer questions concerning their being in the modern world.
The interesting question, thus, is not why this or that country is included in (or excluded from) the putative or real Global South, but how a particular culture positions itself in a world understood in terms of various geographical, geopolitical and geocultural divides. Essentially
the same question is about the ways in which a particular culture maps the globe. Of course, this mapping or positioning is a historical phe-nomenon and does change with the passing of time. Like large tectonic plates, cultures can also drift to the West or East, float to the South or North and cause violent eruptions when they collide. Thus, countries, which several decades ago were defined as Eastern, now seem to belong to the West or North. Sometimes this drift, accelerated by politics, can be as radical and fast-moving as the widening gap between Russia and Ukraine is. Thus, the most interesting question is not so much about the current cultural positioning, but rather the history of the mapping.
This mapping, being geographical, is, however, also political, eco-nomic, cultural, moral, religious, and so on. This means that it is based upon the answers to questions about political allies, economic collaborators, cultural relatives, moral connections or religious com-munities. These answers define ‘our’ cultural identity – not only in the sense of understanding who ‘we’ really are, but also in the sense of who
‘we’ were or who ‘we’ want to be. In this process of self-positioning the tenses are interconnected, so that not only does past history define future actions, but also the changing answers we give to the question of who we want to be in the future make us revisit and reinterpret our past. This constant process of autonomous reinterpretation of our posi-tion in the world influences our real world experience. Taken together, these experiences and interpretations define the particular form of modernity a particular society takes (Wagner 2008).
Here we are going to generally outline the history of Russian world-mapping over the last two or three centuries. We start with a very brief description of the eighteenth-century understanding and pay the closest attention to the nineteenth century, which arguably defines in many ways the position of Russian culture until the present.
After another very short consideration of twentieth-century Russia, we will draw some general conclusions. Of course, this account will necessarily be very sketchy and incomplete. Detailed discussion of the nineteenth-century interpretation of the relations between Russia and Europe or the West alone would require thousands of pages, since all great Russian writers and intellectuals of that time answered the ques-tion about these relaques-tions in their own ways. Their understanding of Russia’s relation to Asia and the East is another equally long story. We believe, however, that this account, even if incomplete and imperfect, remains very useful, since it helps us to better understand the nature of the Russian quest to make its own way in modernity.
It must be said here from the very beginning that the idea of Russia somehow belonging to any kind of Global South has never been present in Russian culture. The South, as we will see, has always been an alien ‘other’ of Russia, which itself oscillated between North, East and West, between Europe and Asia, between the Slavic world and the Central Asian nomadic empires. These concepts, along with the idea of Eastern (Orthodox) Christianity, form the landscape in which Russia keeps defining its place in the modern world.
Russia as the European North
Sixteenth-century Russia, liberating itself from what later became known as the Tatar yoke, took national pride in its being the only existing Orthodox kingdom. In 1510, in his letters to the Grand Prince of Moscow, Vasili III Ivanovich, the monk Philotheus of Pskov (1465–
1542) argued for a theory of Moscow as the Third Rome, which became the core of the young Russian state’s political ideology and geopolitical mapping for at least two centuries. Since, according to Philotheus, ‘two Romes have fallen, and the Third stands, and a fourth shall never be’
(see Toumanoff 1954–5: 438; Duncan 2000: 11–12), the fall of Moscow would necessarily have eschatological consequences. That is why, when in the troubled seventeenth century some people decided that both tsar and clergy had fallen into heresy, they saw in it clearly apocalyp-tic signs of the approaching Doomsday. The result was the complex eschatology of the Old Believers, a conservative religious movement in many aspects similar to some denominations of Western European Protestantism. The idea of the Third Rome, however, made Russia the messianic centre, culturally isolated from the rest of the world, and did not really promote thinking about its relation to the other parts of the globe. At the same time it was the sixteenth century that witnessed a great expansion of the Moscow Kingdom, one of the most impressive acts of which was the beginning of the colonisation of Siberia.
The contacts with the external world were intensified in the second half of the seventeenth century, when Russia started attracting foreign-ers (especially Germans and Dutch) to live and work in Moscow. The crucial breakthrough in this respect was, however, made by Peter the Great (1672–1725), who, with the founding of St Petersburg, according to the famous saying of Pushkin’s (actually taken from Italian writer Francesco Algarotti), ‘cut the window through on Europe’ (Pushkin 1960: 285). In addition to moving the capital from Moscow to this
newly founded northern capital, he established (in 1721) the Russian Empire and reformed Russian life according to Western European standards, using for this purpose the most cruel means. He defeated the Swedish troops of Charles XII, made Russia an important European sea power and started to actively interfere in European affairs. Russia as a young European power developed really fast and already Catherine the Great (1729–96), who was in correspondence with both Diderot and Voltaire, came to be widely praised as a European enlightened ruler.
In her Nakaz (Instructions), a statement of legal principles, she defined Russia as a ‘European Power’ of ‘European People’ (Ekaterina II 1849:
4).Throughout the eighteenth century, thus, Russia positioned itself as an essentially European, or Northern European, country not only according to its physical geography, but also in accordance with its interests, values, actions, and so on. Thus, the first independent modern Russian scientist, the founder of Moscow University, Michael Lomonosov, praised the daughter of Peter the Great, Elisabeth I, for her giving ‘calm to the whole Europe’ (Lomonosov 1803a: 282) and
‘subduing military noise in the whole Europe’ (Lomonosov 1803b: 284).
Welcoming the teenage Peter III, he calls him ‘future possessor of the North’ (Lomonosov 1959a: 62), but in his ode to Elisabeth II of the same 1742 he mentions the ‘cold North’, ‘sultry steppes’, ‘American waves from the Eastern countries’ and ‘Baltic shores’, that is, all four cardinal points, as loyal to the Russian Empress (Lomonosov 1959b: 284–90).
In dedication to Peter III, prefacing Lomonosov’s Compendium of Eloquence, he again speaks of the Russian Emperor as called to the
‘adornment and defence of the whole North’ (Lomonosov 1952: 92). It is just very natural, then, that Lomonosov paid such close attention to the Russian North and Siberia, urging the exploration of the Northern Sea Route to the eastern parts of the Russian Empire. And his main conclusion is not surprising either: ‘Russian might will grow with Siberia and the Northern Ocean and will reach the main European settlements in Asia and America’ (Lomonosov 1950: 630).
The Great French Revolution frightened both enlightened Catherine the Great and Russian noble society. One of the results of this shock and fear was the idea of an opposition between a stable European North and revolutionary South of Europe. Russia was now increasingly viewed as a potential rescuer of Europe and a successor of the fallen France as far as the Enlightenment was concerned. Talented poet and gifted statesman of the first half of the nineteenth century, a close friend
of Pushkin and the first head of the Imperial Russian Historical Society, Prince Peter Vyazemskiy clearly expresses this idea in his poem
‘Petersburg’. He specifically insists on the fact that Russia is glorious not only with its military victories, but also with the arts and sciences.
The beginning of this glory was the ‘stately spirit of Peter and intellect of Catherine’. Thus, ‘the day was dimming in the South when dawn we had’. In the South rebellion and prejudices ‘threatened to reduce to ashes the sanctuary of Enlightenment’, but ‘the North became its asylum’. So, when in Europe the old world was ignited with revolt and sedition, a ‘creative spirit hovered over young Russia and called it to its feat . . .’ (Vyazemskiy 1880: 158–9). That is why all arts and sciences, which used to inhabit the South, are now Russian natives (Vyazemskiy 1880: 159). The Messianic idea of Russia as the rescuer of Europe became archetypical for Russian culture and in various forms has been repeated throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and even twenty-first centuries whatever real or perceived dangers threatened Europe. It still very much defines the complex relation of Russian society towards its European alter ego.
The beginning of the nineteenth century witnessed a national rise and great Russian success in Europe. Having defeated Napoleon, Russia established itself as a mighty European power. Since this time Russia has been actively interfering in European affairs and thus has become an integral part and (some would also think – a guarantor) of the European system of international security. The national rise has naturally been accompanied by blooming culture. Defeat of the Decembrist revolt in 1825 delayed development and started a long period of conservative reaction but did not shatter this understand-ing of Russia as a fast-developunderstand-ing European country. Thus already in 1844 one of the early Slavophiles, a brilliant writer and a follower of Schelling and Hoffman, Prince Vladimir Odoyevskiy, did not hesitate to announce in the midst of the dark times of the reaction of the reign of Nicolas I: ‘The nineteenth century belongs to Russia’ (Odoyevskiy 1913: 423). Interestingly, it was written some eight years before the Crimean War, which, together with the revolutions of 1848–9, signifi-cantly changed Russian feelings towards Western Europe.
Russia as the Christian East: Russia and Slavdom
It was not, however, Prince Odoyevskiy who initiated the discussion of so-called Slavophiles and Westernisers on the identity of Russia.
Russian visitors to Europe started making comparisons already in the eighteenth century. The comparisons were always ambiguous:
on the one hand, Russia seemed to be a backward country in need of urgent modernisation, while on the other hand, Russian noble travel-lers abhorred what they perceived as the petty bourgeois lifestyle of Western Europe. Thus, already Denis Fonvisin, a writer and memoirist of the eighteenth century, during his European travel complained:
‘money is the first God of this land. Moral corruption has reached the degree that mean acts are not punished even by contempt . . .’ (Fonvisin 1959: 461). Nikolay Gogol, with his aesthetic mindset, thought that only comparatively backward Italy managed to preserve the creative spirit, which long ago used to penetrate Western Europe: ‘All Europe is only to look at, and Italy is to live in’ (Zenkovskiy 1926: 50).
One should also remember the fact that the Russian nobility of this time often did not read Russian at all and spoke it only as a second language. Their first language was French, and English and German were also widely spoken. Peter the Great’s reforms created a Russian European nobility, who lived in Russia as if in a foreign colony. This unfortunate divide persisted throughout the nineteenth century. The noble ‘European’ stratum was gradually widening and in the 1860s it started to include lower classes, mostly sons of the clergy, to form a peculiar social phenomenon: a rationalistic intelligentsia. Although they started to talk and to write Russian, their rationalistic mindset differed greatly from the Orthodox mysticism of their own fathers and of the majority of the peasant population. This ‘intelligentsia–people’
divide, so characteristic of Russian culture of the nineteenth century was, so to speak, the internal dimension of a growing awareness of the difference between Russia and Western Europe. It is at this time that Russia started to understand itself as East in contrast to the West of European culture.
In different times the basic cleavage of Russian society has been conceptualised differently: as the East–West contradiction, as the Orthodoxy–rational science divide, and so on, but it is the ‘intel-ligentsia–people (narod)’ opposition that became the idée fixe for all Russian literature. Thus, the famous Russian Husserlian philosopher, Gustav Shpet (1879–1937), described this problem of Russia as the main problem of Russian philosophy:
the ‘people’, and the ‘intelligentsia’ as the creative spokesman of the people, are related to one another both philosophically and
culturally. Russian philosophy approaches its problem of Russia as the problem of the relations of the above-mentioned terms, some-times from the side of ‘the people’, somesome-times from the side of the
‘intelligentsia’, but always solves the only problem, the problem of the relation itself. The difference and even opposition of the answers – sub specie of the people and sub specie of the intelligentsia – defines the peculiar dialectics of Russian philosophy . . . (Shpet 2008: 76) Internal and external divides reinforced each other: those critical of Western Europe also wanted to correct the excesses of Russian enlightenment and to find a specific Russian way in modern civilisa-tion; those who thought of the West as the best implementation of modern civilisation naturally wanted to finish what Peter the Great had only started and to ‘Westernise’ the whole country. The split itself, however, has always been understood as a symptom of a deadly disease of Russian culture. Westernisers of the early nineteenth century saw the nature of this illness in the ignorance and backwardness of the people, while Slavophiles of the time interpreted the divide as a deadly split between borrowed enlightenment and original Russian life. One of the fathers of Slavophilism, Alexey Khomyakov, in his article of 1845 called this borrowed science ‘colonial’ (Khomyakov 1900: 24) and vehemently condemned its discord with the life that had created great Russia ‘before foreign science came to gild its tops’ (Khomyakov 1900:
22). Being a follower of Schelling and a lover of Britain, Khomyakov, however, thought that scholarship (especially in the social sciences and humanities) must correspond to the life of the nation, must be of the same roots, so to speak. The absence of such correspondence led to a situation in which ‘there was knowledge in the upper classes, but this knowledge was absolutely remote from life; there was life in the lower classes, but this life never rose to consciousness’ (Khomyakov 1900: 22).
This split was the primary object of analysis for Russian philosophy and sociology and arguably also became one of the reasons for the Russian Revolution.
The Westernisers were the first to start this discussion. It was a brilliant noble officer, a participant in the war against Napoleon, mystical philosopher, younger friend of the great Russian historian, Karamzin, and older associate of the great Russian poet, Pushkin, Peter Chaadayev, who in 1829–31 in his ‘Philosophical Letters’ (written, by the way, in French) vehemently criticised Russia as a country that had deviated from the ways of humankind:
One of the saddest features of our peculiar civilisation is that we are only discovering the truths that have already become truisms in other places and even among the peoples lagging far behind us.
This is because we were never united with other peoples; we do not belong to any great families of humankind; we belong neither to the West nor to the East, and we do not have the traditions of either of them. As if standing out of time, we were not touched by the world-wide education of humankind. (Chaadayev 1914b: 110)
Russian spiritual life, according to Chaadayev, is very underdeveloped.
However:
standing between two main parts of the world, East and West, resting with one elbow against China and with the other against Germany, we should have linked in us both principles of the spirit, imagination and reason, and should have combined in our civilisation the history of the whole globe. This, however, was not the destiny designated for us by Providence. (Chaadayev 1914b: 116)
Being an ardent preacher of the Catholic unity of Europe and of the beneficial influence of Catholicism upon the formation of European civilisation, he naturally saw the first cause of this unfortunate deviation of Russia in that it had borrowed its Christianity from the ‘miserable Byzantine, deeply despised by (European) peoples’ (Chaadayev 1914b:
118). Separated from the rest of Europe, Russia became a victim of the Tatar yoke, and, after liberation from it, a victim of the yoke of its own state power, which succeeded the Tatars in its despotism (Chaadayev 1914b: 111). This characterisation was partly a result of what Chaadayev saw in Russia after he came back from his foreign trip. This was a new Russia of the conservative reaction of Nicholas I, when all Chaadayev’s Decembrist friends were either in prison or in Siberia (see Gershenzon 1908: 63–4). Philosophical Letters, in spite of all their ‘social mysticism’
(Gershenzon 1908: 64), became a manifesto for the later Westernisers.
Chaadayev, of course, was very far from unbelieving in Russia.
Chaadayev, of course, was very far from unbelieving in Russia.